What You Will Find Here & Now
Biography detailing Gabriel's career; gallery of Gabriel from various angles, various ages, various haircuts and various beards; PG price guide of the UK vinyl and cd rarities; recent mailing addresses; shop of rare PG
posters such as Sledgehammer & Birdy
and rare cds including the mythical Steam box.

If you would like to add to the price guide or have any suggestions please e-mail me by clicking here. It doesn't matter if the item is non-UK - the overriding objective is to make the guide a exhaustive as can be. If you are going to send a suggested price for an item, please could you send it in the format below:

Peter Gabriel is unique. By that, I mean I don't know of any other musician who so successfully blends the pop song with world music and with modern art. And in doing so, somehow, he makes the listener and/or the audience believe that they too can do something, anything, better than what they are doing now. You come out of one of his gigs and realise that there is something more to life than here and now, something better, something I can't put into words so it must be art.

Maybe, it's the simplicity of his lyrics. Invariably made up of small words they go to the heart, to the point. Nothing is wasted; nothing is elaborate. And they are wrapped around delicious melodies and sung with that beautiful, softily-gruff-kind-of-voice. And the music is always packaged with design that is ART.

Put all together, he's at the top of the tree.

The boring facts on Gabriel are thus: with Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford
and Anthony Phillips, he founded Genesis
in 1967 at Charterhouse School. The weird and disgraced
Jonathan King suggested the name and lived on the tale for many a year.

With Phil Collins installed as drummer and backing vocalist, Genesis quickly found fame, mainly through their live performancs and,
in particular, Gabriel's extravagant stage
costumes and diving from the stage. Gabriel as
stage performer was and is second to none.

Tensions surfaced in the band and in 1975 Gabriel left the band. Going back to my earlier point, his dislike on elaborating on language meant that his first four solo albums were untitled. Indeed, when he did name later albums, he kept the titles as short as possible. So, Us, Up, Hit and Miss ... with all of them,
you couldn't say that the title distracted you from the record which is perhaps what he meant, or perhaps he didn't.

His first major hit single, Solsbury Hill (1977), came from
the first album and it wasn't until the release of
his third in 1980 that he had more big hits, Games Without Frontiers and Biko. Shock the Monkey came from the fourth.

It was shaping up to be a mildly successful solo career. You know, solid fan base without enticing the mainstream. 1986 and the release of So (co-produced with Daniel Lanois) changed all that. Suddenly, Gabriel was battling with the heavyweights of rock stardom's premier league. Indeed, if it had been released the year previous, he would no doubt have been one of the headliners at Live Aid.

The success was due in no small part to the success of single Sledgehammer, whose success was due in no small part to the success of the video, which was soooo far ahead of its time that it hasn't come back yet! Gabriel collaborated with director Stephen R. Johnson, Aardman Animations, and the Brothers Quay on this, and won numerous awards at the 1987 MTV Music Video Awards. That and the video for the follow-up, Big Time, set the benchmark for not only promotional videos and proved that they could be so much more a singer singing into a microphone type thingy. The ultimate honour for Sledgehammer, in particular, was that it was shamelessly copied by advertising execs for their commericials for years afterwards!

The result of all this was a No. 1 slot in the US for Sledgehammer.

A couple of other highlights from So was Gabriel's colloborations with Kate Bush on Don't Give Up and Laurie Anderson on This Is The Picture (Excellent Birds).

It was interesting to note what Gabriel decided to do after the enormous success of So. Many artists would have rushed relesed So 2, but not Gabriel. Instead, he released a movie soundtrack, Passion (1989), for
Martin Scorsese's
movie The Last Temptation of Christ, and US (1992), as dark and introspective as So was bright and surface-like. Commerical success was expectedly limited.

Then there was the long, long gap that seemed like an eternity while we waited for OVO (2002), a soundtrack for the London Millennium Dome Show. Out of the whole disaster that was the Dome, only Gabriel came out of it with any credit. In-between the wait we had one of the most surreal happening's in Gabriel's career: namely, his voice ppping up on a Randy Newman song, That'll Do, for the 1998 movie Babe: Pig in the City. The film was rubbish: the song so-so.

In 2002, he released the music to the Australian movie Rabbit-Proof Fence and then Up, a full-length album at last. It seemed through this that he had completed his other side of the world trip from So, for it was as commercially unappealing as can be. With the songs at six minutes or more it was unmade for radio, but was a album that stayed in the memory long after hearing it.

Recently, Gabriel has worked on video games and performed The Book of Love the soundtrack to the film Shall We Dance?. The Hit and Miss compilations came in 2003, as did the Peter Gabriel - Growing Up Live DVD.

In 2005, he compered and performed at the Eden Project Live 8 concert.

He performed John Lennon's Imagine at the Opening Ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, on February 10, 2006.

Away from his career, Gabriel is known for his work with WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance) and his unbelievably beautiful Real World Studios.

He has been married twice. From his first wife, Jill, he has two daughters, Melanie and Anna. With his second wife, Maebh, has a son, Issac, born in 2002.